Reluctant Detective (16 page)

32

Anne raced up the stairs from the Confed Centre's courtyard to the plaza above it. Her eyes had not yet adjusted from the intimate lighting of the bistro to the glare of the noonday sun. For too many precious seconds she couldn't clearly see who or what was around her, but she heard the throaty growl of several Harley motorcycles, and that riveted her attention. She cupped one hand over her eyes
and stared toward the menacing sound. She expected to see Cutter's
friend, Sean McGee, and other thugs astride their black machines, cloaked in black leathers, circling the Confed Centre like vultures spiralling down to feed on a dead carcass. But when her eyes became accustomed to the light, she realized that the rumbling of
engines came only from a pack of tourists, probably retirees, riding
stock bikes with sidecars, and heavily loaded with luggage. They
thundered up Grafton Street, past the war memorial, past Province House, and disappeared just beyond the Provincial Archives.

Several flights of stone steps brought Anne to a grassy divide
between the Confed Centre and Province House, where the legisla
ture sits. She looked desperately for Dit's van, but couldn't spot it.
Her car was in the parking lot on the next street, and she was frantic when she reached it. Seconds later she jammed it in gear, tore out of the lot, and headed in a direction which would quickly get her out of the line of sight of anyone in pursuit.

A few blocks away she pulled over and called Dit on her cell phone.

“Where are you?” There was a remnant of frenzy in her voice

“About five, six blocks from the Confed Centre.”

“What are you doing there? The drop was never made. He never
showed up.” Anne's voice could barely disguise the anger welling up inside her. Dit was letting her down. He should have been in position at the Confed Centre to pick up the signal, and now he had wandered
off somewhere. He could have blown the entire plan. That would have been irresponsible and unforgivable, she thought, especially
when he knew how much she depended upon him to do this job.

“I don't know what happened on your end, but I picked up a signal moving just after eleven-thirty and followed it here.”

“How could that happen?” she demanded.

“How do I know? You sound… angry.”

“I'm… not. It's just that… where are you anyway?”

“MacLauchlan's Motel on Grafton.”

“I'll be right there.”

“Looking forward to it… but drop the attitude somewhere between there and here. The van can't hold that many passengers.”

Anne laid the valise on the front seat and opened it. It was filled
with dozens of old newspapers. She closed it and examined the case.
There was no bullet hole. Then it became clear. It hadn't been a
simple drop. The Client – or his agent – had switched packages, and he had done it while she'd been in the washroom.

Anne pulled into the parking lot at MacLauchlan's Motel. She located Dit's van and hopped into his front seat.

“Sorry,” she said. “He pulled a switch without me knowing.”

“We'll talk about that later. Right now we have a problem.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“The signal led me here. There's his car.” He pointed to a brown Sonata. “Looks like a rental. The driver got out, took a valise with
him, and went into the motel office a couple of minutes ago. He hasn't come out… and the needle's acting funny… and the audio
signal is getting raspy. I've got a feeling that something's not right.”

“I'll check it out,” she said, jumping out and trotting inside to
the reception desk. She interrupted the male desk clerk who was registering a guest. “Excuse me, please, my uncle just came in with a medium-size light brown leather valise. Did you see which way he went?”

“Pedway to the annex.” He spoke coldly without looking up from
the computer terminal. His left arm lifted and pointed left and down.

“Did he register yet?”

“Not yet,” he said to Anne. “And Jimmy will help you with your
luggage, Sir,” he said to his customer, and his face blossomed with a bright professional smile.

Anne ran back to the van.

“Dit, there's an underground corridor that links this building with the motel's annex across the street. He took that. He must be there.”

“Not necessarily.”

“How far is the beeper from here?”

“It doesn't give distance. Just direction. But we'll see,” he said and
drove out of the lot and across the street and into the lot of the
annex.

“He's not here either. The signal's weaker, and I'm not getting a clear audio tone. I'm thinking that he changed cars.”

“What are we going to do? We can't let him get away.”

“This is where it
doesn't
get simple,” he said.

Anne's mind was churning out a fistful of questions she needed
answers to, but she chose not to ask Dit any of them. In fact, the
grave tone in Dit's voice convinced her that it were better if she said nothing at all for the moment.

Dit drove about for three or four minutes, his eyes regularly
dropping from the road to the needle on his receiver and back again. He wore a set of earphones plugged into the device. Anne kept silent
while he drove down one block, then another, then another and
then another, saying nothing until, at one point, Anne felt that she
would burst.

“You're driving in circles! Why can't you find him?”

“I'm driving in a grid,” he corrected. “Don't get excited. I hope to
find him by tracking the strongest signal.”

“Hope to find him? What does that mean?”

“Just what I said.”

“And what do you mean by strongest signal. It points to where he
is, doesn't it?”

“It does if you're close behind. If not, then the signal bounces off
nearby buildings. You get echoes… reflections. Strong and weak ones. The strong ones are likely the truer ones. Seems like he's
north or west of here. That could be a signal bounce, though. But time is a factor, too. The further off he gets, the weaker the signal overall, and we've got a two- to five-mile signal range at best.”

Dit turned the car onto the Charlottetown bypass and sped up.
Anne couldn't keep quiet. She erupted again. “We're not going north or west. We're going east!”

“I can't acquire a strong signal downtown. Too many buildings. I'm
heading for the airport. It may not be the right direction, but it has
the highest elevation. It'll give us our best shot. Maybe our only one.”

Road construction and heavier midday traffic slowed their movement up the highway to the airport. It sprawled across a
hilltop northeast of the city. Dit's van pulled off the bypass road and
followed a secondary road along a high chain-link fence bordering a runway. He pulled over and adjusted the volume and sensitivity.
Then he took off the headphones and set them on top of the console.

“The signal's clearer but weak and getting weaker. There's no hope of crossing town and picking it up on the other side. He's moving too
fast. Best I can tell is that he's heading west-northwest. What do you
want to do?”

“There's
no way
we can track him?”

“Not unless this Chrysler grows wings.”

“What if we just head in that direction? Wouldn't we pick up the signal eventually?”

“Possible, but unlikely. Any hills would block the signal, and there's no guarantee that he wouldn't cross the bridge to New Brunswick or Nova Scotia.”

“Sometimes… like now… I have to believe in the success of hopeless causes. Let's try. I can't give up now.”

Dit looked out the window at the flat green plains surrounding the
airport. Long grasses swayed in the steady breeze, and late spring
flowers were colouring the ditches and shoulders of the roadways.

“It's still a pretty grand day to tour the countryside,” he said, trying
out a confident, resigned tone, “and maybe later we can find a nice restaurant to celebrate, or a bluesy bar to drink our troubles into
oblivion.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

33

“I've got one,” Jacqui shouted. She hauled back the pole and line.
A one-pound trout dangled from the hook. She cranked the reel a
few turns. The fish's tail slapped the water. She cranked a few more turns and leaned back. The trout jumped and bounced onto the end of the dock and into her lap. “Delia! Help me!”

“God luv a duck, I never saw a young girl as helpless as this one!” she muttered under her breath.

“Help! I don't know what to do with it!” She lifted the pole above
her head and the thrashing fish lifted up and swung in complete
circles around her before Delia could grab the line and trap the fish between her firm hand and the planks of the dock.

“There! I think we've tamed the old thing. I'll hold it down, and you work the hook out.”

“I can't. I'll hurt it.”

“It won't hurt. They've got no feelings there.”

“I can't.”

“Let me show you,” she said, grabbing the shank of the hook and backing the barbed end out of the fish's mouth. “There!” She kept a
firm hand around the trout and added, “Are we keeping it for supper or tossing it back?”

“Toss it back,” she said after a momentary but deliberate rationalization.

Delia dropped the fish into the brown waters and watched it swim away.

“That was only a couple of mouthfuls anyway,” she said.
A couple of right tasty mouthfuls
, she thought.

“Have you had enough of fishin', then?”

“Oh no, Aunt Delia. This is fun.” She threw the hook into the water, fed out some line, and watched the bobber drift downstream.

Ben's Lake was hardly a lake at all, even by PEI standards. It had
been a free-flowing stream that scarcely anyone took notice of until someone dammed it up. The dam was high enough to create a thirty-yard width to the stream. The creek that fed it ran through the fold between two hills. The length of it disappeared around a
bend a hundred yards behind the dam and gave the illusion that it
was much longer than it was.

The illusion of a lake was enough for Jacqui, though, and for the
tourists who came with their tents and trailers, now erected or
parked in the meadow beyond the road and behind a thick stand of white pines. The lake had been stocked with fish. A few short docks reached into it. A canteen stood nearby, and benches were scattered about. For these, Delia was especially grateful.

She wasn't used to teenagers any more. The busyness of them was
trying, and so was the boredom with which they punctuated it. She hadn't remembered being so when she was young, but she allowed
that she probably had been. It was so long ago.

Jacqui, on the other hand, was like those yearlings up at Calder's Stables. Jacqui had the same eyes as they did, wide and bright and
eager enough to run toward almost everything they fancied, and
they fancied almost everything.

Delia couldn't explain why she had agreed to accept Jacqui into her
home for the week. She was seventy-five, a young seventy-five she
would say to anyone who asked, but one troubled with arthritis. And carrying the pain of that old person's curse, she was always pleased
to find a comfortable interval between benches and chairs, and car
seats and doorsteps, to rest on.

Delia thought back to Anne's phone call, just a few days after poor
Billy's funeral. She would have said no to her request to put the girl up, but there was something in her voice that welled up from
desperation. Anne hadn't said so, but Delia firmly believed that she was facing some crisis in her life. Christian charity wouldn't abide Delia saying no to her, and that was that.

It wasn't so bad, though. Sure, Jacqui was wearing her out, but the
girl was also making her remember what it was like to be young, even if she couldn't recapture what it felt like. When was the last time she had baited a hook, she wondered. Forty, fifty years ago? No doubt even longer. Delia watched Jacqui fidgeting on the edge of the dock: she stood up; then she sat; she cast out, reeled in, and cast out again; she squatted on a post and gawked into the water;
she jerked the line and muttered at the inactivity of her bobber, as if enthusiasm by itself would tempt fish onto her hook.

And anyone who saw Delia sitting on that bench at that moment would have thought her a bit odd, too, as well as old, perhaps even
tottering on the brink of senility, all because she was chuckling to
herself. And rather loudly, at that.

It was a long couple of miles from Ben's Lake back to the farmhouse in Iona. Delia drove her car at exactly five miles below the
posted speed limit. Whenever a troubling number of cars piled up behind her, she pulled over onto the shoulder and waited for them to pass. During one of her pull-overs, she conversed with Jacqui.

“Did you enjoy the fishing?”

“It was great, Aunt Delia, but the fish stopped biting.”

“Did you put fresh bait on your hook?”

“Do you mean the worms?”

“Of course, the worms. What else would you use?” Delia drew back, thinking that she may have sounded crankier than she had intended.

“I thought the worms were kind of yucky. I didn't think a fish
would really like them.”

“So what you're saying is that you didn't bait your hook. Is that it?”

“There was a bit of hot dog bun on the dock. I used that instead.”

“I see.”

“And what made you think that would be a treat for a brook trout?”

Jacqui explained about the tourist who asked how the fish were
biting. She told him, and he suggested the bread for bait. Delia
seemed to recollect him and one or two others who wandered by
the dock.

“What else did he say?”

“Not much, just wondering where I was from, and my favourite
part of the Island, and where my mom worked. Just small talk. You know.”

“Small talk, eh?”

“Yeah. Like he didn't know where the nearest store was. I told him I didn't know.”

“It's half a mile down our road.”

“Yeah, I forgot. So I told him I was on vacation with you. Then he
went to ask somebody else.”

“Well I hope he doesn't get lost. It's easy to get turned around out here.”

“He won't. That was him that passed us.”

“Now how could you possibly know that?” she asked incredulously.

“He had a silly hat on. One of those straw ones to keep the sun out.”

“Hmmmph,” said Delia.

Delia turned onto the Iona Road and crept past a string of modest hills and valleys until she passed the general store just short of St. Michael's Church. Two vehicles were parked in front, a white cargo
van and a grey Buick sedan. Delia pulled into the long driveway in front of their house. Her car rumbled over the crushed gravel
roadway. In her rearview mirror she saw a grey sedan drive slowly by. She also noticed the silhouette of a straw hat worn by the driver.